Dan, now duly sworn to serve the state faithfully as a legislator, had been placed on several important committees, and a busy winter stretched before him.  Morton Bassett’s hand lay heavily upon the legislature; the young man had never realized until he took his seat in the lower house how firmly Bassett gripped the commonwealth.  Every committee appointment in both houses had to be approved by the senator from Fraser.  Dan’s selection as chairman of the committee on corporations both pleased and annoyed him.  He would have liked to believe himself honestly chosen by the speaker on the score of fitness; but he knew well enough that there were older men, veteran legislators, more familiar with the state’s needs and dangers, who had a better right to the honor.  The watchful “Advertiser” had not overlooked his appointment.  On the day the committees were announced it laid before its readers a cartoon depicting Bassett, seated at his desk in the senate, clutching wires that radiated to every seat in the lower house.  One desk set forth conspicuously in the foreground was inscribed “D.H.”  “The Lion and Daniel” was the tag affixed to this cartoon, which caused much merriment among Dan’s friends at the round table of the University Club.

Miss Bassett’s debut was fixed for Washington’s Birthday, and as Mrs. Owen’s house had no ballroom (except one of those floored attics on which our people persist in bestowing that ambitious title) she decided that the Propylaeum alone would serve.  Pray do not reach for your dictionary, my friend!  No matter how much Greek may have survived your commencement day, you would never know that our Propylaeum (reared by the women of our town in North Street, facing the pillared facade of the Blind Institute) became, on its completion in 1890, the centre of our intellectual and social life.  The club “papers” read under that roof constitute a literature all the nobler for the discretion that reserves it for atrabilious local criticism; the later editions of our jeunesse doree have danced there and Boxed and Coxed as Dramatic Club stars on its stage.  “Billy” Sumner once lectured there on “War” before the Contemporary Club, to say nothing of Mr. James’s appearance (herein before mentioned), which left us, filled with wildest surmise, on the crest of a new and ultimate Darien.  Nor shall I omit that memorable tea to the Chinese lady when the press became so great that a number of timorous Occidentals in their best bib and tucker departed with all possible dignity by way of the fire-escape.  So the place being historic, as things go in a new country, Mrs. Owen did not, in vulgar parlance, “hire a hall,” but gave her party in a social temple of loftiest consecration.